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Nalates Urriah

Second Life News 2015-06

Servers

There was no Beta Server UG meeting this week. The Lindens were meeting to decide on which projects would be planned for implementation in 2015. With any luck we’ll hear what they decided, at least to some degree.

Slow render Feb 2015

I am hoping they decide to work on the viewer’s caching system. I’m tired of coming home to a grey house, something I can do several times per day when I am in Second Life.

I am also hoping they get the Avatar Render Cost feature working. My hope is they will flash a value on screen when you add any new attachment to the avatar. I think it would be great to have that happen when trying on mesh demos. I think it would put pressure on designers to make more render efficient items.

Viewers

The main viewer is now version 3.7.24-297623. (Release Notes) This is the viewer with reduced pipelined texture and mesh fetching timeout. So stalled connections fail quickly, allowing earlier retry. The timeout value changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds for textures, and from 600 to 240 seconds for meshes.

BUG-7687nothing is rezing in SL, av’s are all gray and textures will not rez

BUG-7688Since the last restarts I can’t seem to see things I rez from my inventory or wear mesh in my inventory. I have done numerous clean installs of the latest LL viewer. I have also made sure I am not running the beta version of the AMD CCC.

BUG-7698Textures much slower to load on a CDN region then on a clone of the same region not running CDN

I’ve been using 3.7.24 (297623). I’m not sure these bugs have been fixed. I was getting much faster renders weeks ago. Things seem to have gone the wrong way for me. I now have horribly slow renders and single digit FPS in any area with more than a dozen avatars. The viewer does mini freeze after mini freeze.

RC & Project Viewers

On Tuesday the 3rd a new Project Viewer popped up: Project Importer Viewer version 3.7.25.298441. I haven’t used this one, yet. What I get from the release notes follows. If you are importing mesh items, this is an important set of viewer changes.

This viewer has changes to the viewer’s IMPORT feature. It has an optional feature to allow more debugging output. The Lindens describe this saying, “An ImporterDebug option has been added to the settings.xml file which, if enabled, causes more information to be output during import than you can shake a stick at. The extra output can be very helpful for diagnosing authoring errors (e.g. violating the material subset constraints mentioned above) and pinpoint what needs to be fixed in the source model for successful import.”

Better handling of objects with lots of materials. They say we can now import objects with more than8 material faces. Your simplified LOD’s must still have all the same materials. It would have been nice if that could have been changed.

This RC adds name based LOD association. They say, “LODs and Physics reps can now be explicitly associated with a given mesh in the full LOD model using name-based matching. By properly naming the meshes in your lower LOD meshes and physics reps, you can avoid issues with ordering of the meshes within your DCC tool and other material mismatching errors.” I’m not sure what this means. I expect we’ll see people discussing this in the forum.

So, for those importing mesh, this is a viewer to get now and start testing. While the Lindens are working on this part of the viewer it is the TIME to get them to make other fixes and quickly fix bugs you find.

Project ToolsUpdate Viewer version 3.7.25.298587 – Release Notes – Wednesday January 28th this project viewer appeared. This is the viewer built with the new Auto-Build compiler tools.